Moving on Down

“The Middle,” “Raising Hope,” and the working-class sitcom.

Though warm and funny, “The Middle” is full of jagged notes that make it a gutsy show.Credit Illustration by Barry Falls

For sitcom snobs, it’s been a rough winter. “30 Rock” aired its finale. “Don’t Trust the B” tanked. New episodes of ABC’s “Happy Endings”—a witty ensemble series that looks like “Friends” but tastes like “Seinfeld”—have been booted to late March. The networks are delivering sound bites about broad comedy, nostalgia for Must-See TV—that kind of thing.

To be fair, you could write this lament every year: like Broadway, the sitcom is eternally the subject of premature obituaries. But, rather than dwell in bitterness, or gang up on NBC’s struggling reboot of “Community,” we might turn our attention to two excellent sitcoms rarely mentioned in quality-comedy conversation: “The Middle,” created by Eileen Heisler and DeAnn Heline, and “Raising Hope,” created by Greg Garcia. Both are family comedies, set in small towns. Both focus on lower-middle-class families, a rarity on television. These comedies are no-nonsense on the topic of money; they dwell on social class, rather than ignore it like most network shows. Mostly, they’re just funny and original creations, albeit easy to mistake for corny at first glance.

“The Middle,” now in its fourth season on ABC, is about two worn-out working parents, Frankie and Mike Heck; their teen-agers, Sue and Axl; and their “quirky” younger son, Brick. The show is often compared to the nineties sitcom “Malcolm in the Middle,” because it, too, featured an odd kid. There’s a major difference, however: while Malcolm was gifted, Brick (Atticus Shaffer) is smart but special-needs, with attention problems, social issues, and tics that include a habit of whispering a word after he’s said it. On NBC’s “Parenthood,” an upper-middle-class couple throw all their resources toward their son with Asperger’s; on “The Middle,” Brick’s parents just want to know if his school-mandated therapies are free. When Brick gets angry, he complains that Frankie has given up when it comes to him: “You don’t care. You don’t have anything left. You don’t even have enough energy to yell at me.”

This sounds like a downer, and the show has a brassy look that can put new viewers off; while it’s shot with a single camera, like many hip modern comedies, it has the aggression of an old-fashioned multi-cam, with bright lighting and emphatic musical stings. That vibe is misleading, though: “The Middle” is a stealthily sophisticated show, with warm elements that are ballasted by its bleak existential center. The show’s most unsettling character is its narrator—Frankie Heck (Patricia Heaton), whose motto is “You do for family.” Heisler and Heline both wrote for “Roseanne,” but unlike that show’s iconic mom—or Malcolm’s mom, Lois—Frankie isn’t so much a charismatic steamroller as an antenna shuddering with anxiety. Convinced that her family consists of mediocrities—“eenie” people, the ones who never get to “moe”—she’s got endless plans to improve their lives, but, as with her predecessor, Lucille Ball, these well-intentioned schemes tend to blow up in her face.

“The Middle” features two of the most realistic teen-age kids on television, both played by stellar physical comedians. As the football jock Axl, Charlie McDermott is a sulky rubber band who throws himself over sofas, like the boneless cat in “Peanuts.” Eden Sher gives an even more fearless performance as Axl’s younger sister, Sue, a spaz in rainbow prints. Barrelling into rejection, Sue is like a braces-faced sister to “Enlightened” ’s Amy Jellicoe and “Saturday Night Live” ’s Mary Katherine Gallagher. “I suggest buying a wacky hat and starting your cat collection now,” Axl snarls at his sister. “That’s not even an insult,” Sue replies. “I love cats.” Her resilience (her computer password is “I Heart Trying”) keeps “The Middle” from ever turning sour. When the character does have a breakthrough—as when she performs a defiant, arm-wriggling dance with her off-brand cheer team, the Wrestlerettes—it’s thrilling. A recent kiss was one of TV’s loveliest romantic moments.

But if Sue is the show’s breakout character, there’s an equal originality to her father, the taciturn Mike (Neil Flynn); his brand of masculinity is rare among men on sitcoms, who tend to be as neurotic as L.A. TV writers. The manager at a quarry, Mike is skeptical of Frankie’s Oprah-tinged ideas. Yet he’s not a tough guy or a bully; he’s a product of his extended family, which includes his even more reclusive father and his dysfunctional leech of a brother. (Unlike most shows, “The Middle” regularly features extended family; it’s also unusual in showing the local church in a positive light.) Like Frankie, Mike is ground down by responsibility, more so since Frankie lost her job. They’re drowning in credit-card debt; they couldn’t afford Christmas gifts; and, when a tree branch wrecked their car, the insurance company refused to call it an act of God. The tighter the financial vise gets, the more Mike’s manner comes across as healthy realism: unlike Frankie, he accepts life’s limits.

This season’s opening episode was set during a summer that Frankie kept trying to turn into a perfect memory. In July, however, she stumbled on an upsetting revelation: her kids have a favorite parent, and it’s not her. At the Fourth of July picnic that Frankie had planned and prepared, she lay fuming, next to her silent family, as fireworks exploded in the distance, out of their view. That episode had plenty of jokes and warmth—and, as always, Frankie was able to scrapbook her memories in the end—but that moment felt legitimately painful. It was the sort of jagged note that “The Middle” lets linger, and which also marks it as one of the gutsier shows television has produced about family life.

“Raising Hope” is a far sillier concoction, and it’s set in a family a notch down from the Hecks, one that Frankie would likely see as white trash. The terrific Martha Plimpton and Garrett Delahunt play Virginia and Burt Chance, a maid and a pool cleaner who were teen parents to their only son, Jimmy (Lucas Neff), and who are helping him rear his own kid. They also care for Virginia’s grandmother (Cloris Leachman), who has dementia, and their house is chaotic enough that the state once arrested them for elder neglect. Greg Garcia’s default mode, as on his earlier series “My Name Is Earl,” is surreality, and the premise of “Raising Hope” is so ridiculous that I’m going to tuck it into parentheses. (When he was in his early twenties, Jimmy got a serial killer pregnant. After she was electrocuted by the state, he brought up the baby, Hope. Later, it turns out that Hope’s mom wasn’t actually electrocuted—long story.)

Some of the show’s best episodes are so zany and high concept that they’re almost impossible to summarize. My personal favorite was a bizarre homage to the documentary “Marwencol,” in which a brain-injured artist worked through his trauma by making hand-painted Second World War figurines. Another involved a character whose anxiety disorder caused her to pull panty hose over her head, out of fear that spiders would crawl into her ears. (It concluded with a tarantula crawling onto Cloris Leachman’s eyelids.) Despite this lunatic edge, the show has an emotional center, emphasizing the freedom that the Chances have, compared to a fretful striver like Frankie. Because they have no illusions that things will improve (and no chance to get into debt—they blew their credit years ago), they aren’t as weighted by a sense of shame. In a recent episode, in which they visit L.A., a director yells at Virginia, “I don’t come to your work and bother you in your tiny little cubicle.” She’s tickled, taking it as a compliment: “Did you hear that? He thinks I work in a cubicle.”

This season, Jimmy marries his sweetheart, Sabrina, who has a rich family. Sabrina’s clan—complete with the narcissist-bitch mom who has become a tiresome TV staple—is a rare misstep, but the show continues to churn out winners, with goofy gags like “You were a nightmare child. You know that movie, ‘The Exorcist’? You cried the whole way through it.” A Halloween episode became a celebration of gay bars (“ ‘Oodles’ is a gay form of measurement, right?”); the show somehow managed to make even a plot about squirrel rape funny. Like its characters, “Raising Hope” doesn’t much care what you think of it, mixing fart jokes in among the zingers. I wish the show had better ratings, but it makes some sense that it flies under the radar: it’s smart because it isn’t afraid to look dumb. ♦